On Tuesday night, the editor of SLC Dunk, SB Nation’s Utah Jazz blog, posted an article about Gordon Hayward signing with the Boston Celtics. The post contained two attempted jokes that came off as homophobic, and it was deleted following the appendage of two lengthy editor’s notes. Now it appears that the editor who wrote the post, who writes under the byline AllThatAmar, has been fired.
Amar still identifies himself as the editor of SLC Dunk in his Twitter bio (Update, 1:43 pm: His Twitter account no longer mentions any affiliation with SB Nation), but as of yesterday he has been removed from the site’s masthead. A cached version of the masthead from July 2 has him listed as one of the site’s two editors.
Though the post about Hayward has been deleted, a cached version of it can be read here. Here are screenshots of the two jokes, along with the editor’s notes:
Seth Pollack, SB Nation’s NBA league manager, has not returned several requests for comment on whether Amar has been fired. Neither has Kevin Lockland, SB Nation’s general manager. Amar has also not returned a request for clarification on his status.
If Amar has indeed been fired, his fate will serve as another example of how SB Nation’s sprawling, decentralized network of sites can cause headaches. The company’s team blogs operate with little oversight, which can lead to things like unpaid bloggers committing plagiarism or poorly conceived blogs being rushed up on a holiday. As an editor of SLC Dunk, Amar was in theory supposed to provide the oversight that would prevent an embarrassing post like this from ever being published.
Even the editors and site managers in the SB Nation web only receive a paltry monthly stipend for their work, though, so nobody can be too surprised when one of them, while working on a holiday for not much pay, publishes an ill-advised post that probably would have never seen the light of day had it been subject to a professionalized editing process.